Why Should I Learn Agility With My Dog?

Liana: Hey, pet lovers, this is Liana with Wet Noses Pet Sitting and we are a pet sitting and dog walking company in Northern Colorado, and as part of our Pet Care Tips series, I am here today with Amy with Trust Your Dog Training, and thanks so much for being here. Amy: Thanks for having me. Liana: Absolutely! So, do you want to tell us a little bit about you? Amy: Sure. Again, my name is Amy Creaven, I’m with Trust Your Dog Training.I am a certified Karen Pryor Training Partner. I’m a dog trainer up here in Fort Collins, Colorado. I service Northern Colorado for behavioral problems, agility, and then in the summers, I also run rattlesnake training for people who want to use positive reinforcement to train their dogs to avoid rattlesnakes instead of the traditional rattlesnake training, but currently, primarily focusing on in-home private behavior consultations and agility. Liana: That’s quite a slew of things.Amy: I know, it’s too much! Liana: It’s very unique – it’s great! So, for this series, we’re asking everybody, what is the one thing that you believe all pet lovers should know? Amy: So, I believe all pet lovers should know that there are so many benefits to getting out with your dogs and training with them – agility just being one of them. I have so many people who show up to agility classes, and they’re like, omigosh, my dog would be so amazing at doing agility because they see them running in the backyard, and they’re joyful and they’re rambunctious, and they jump over everything, and then they get to class, and they’re like, okay, let’s do this stuff, and then they realize that they need to build their relationship with their dogs.You get them to follow them around the course, so we spend a lot of time in agility classes, just focusing on building that relationship between owner and dogs so that the dogs will do what the owner asks them to do when they ask them to do it. So, I think that if anybody could take one thing home from an agility class, it’s love your dog, build your relationship with them so that you can share this wonderful experience with them, and just have fun. Liana: That’s awesome.That’s pretty great, and I imagine, there’s all sorts of different types of dogs that can do agility – I mean, pretty much any dog can get out here and have a good time. Amy: Absolutely. Liana: You don’t have to have a crazy Border Collie who’s like, sprinting over every jump. Amy: Nope. I have Burmese Mound Dogs come to class, I’ve got Yorkshire Terriers come to class, and then of course, the usual herding dogs like Shelties and Border Collies, and Australian Shepherds, but we have such a wide variety of dogs that do agility, and it’s so much fun, and I have dogs that are old as ten do agility, and as young as two months old come and do agility, and we make sure that it fits the class for everybody.Liana: What are some of the other benefits that people get in addition to forming a better bond with their dog? So, benefits of agility. Amy: So, other benefits of agility, and we focus on this in the introductory class or introduce you to this in the introductory class, is building your dog’s strength and conditioning so that they can do this.As we all know and see, if you ever watch any of the YouTube agility videos, you’ll see dogs running really, really fast and doing really hard things that take a lot of strength to do: running up a dog walk and down the dog walk, and stopping on a dime, and turning on a dime – it takes a lot out of the dogs. So, we do introduce some strength and conditioning component to it so your dogs are stronger and well-conditioned so that when they’re doing agility, they don’t hurt themselves, which then expands into the rest of their life. So, when you’re out hiking with your dog and they go jump over a log, they don’t tear an ACL or something like that, Heaven forbid. Liana: Yes, yeah, and things like the weave poles which seem like not that hard of a concept, but when they’re moving fast, it takes a lot of coordination, muscle. Amy: Yeah, it’s hard on their shoulders and on their hips, and it’s really important to build that stamina and strength so that they can do it when we’re asking them to do it at full speed.Liana: That makes sense. Well, those are great benefits. Agility is fantastic. I think everybody should try agility with their dog at some point. Amy: Me too. Liana: I mean, most dogs enjoy something about it, even if they never like, go on to be crazy competitors or anything, they just enjoy the activity of getting out and spending time with their people. Amy: Absolutely, and that’s a big thing about the classes that I run; it’s not just people who come here and they want to compete with their dogs. It’s somebody who wants to spend more time with their dog, and learn what their dog can do, and it’s kind of neat, especially with Christmas coming up, learning all of the tricks that you can then show off at the parties and dinners. Liana: That’s true! That’s so true, absolutely! There are so many cool things that they just learn how to do that are – there are neat things in agility that you kind of teach as a side effect of needing to learn – it’s not just ‘hop over something,’ there are commands that go with that and things that they have to learn that are great to be used at home.Amy: Absolutely, absolutely. Liana: It’s awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here, really appreciate it. If people want to find out more about you, how can they get in contact with you? Amy: You can find me at www.tydt.dog, or you can find me on Facebook at Trust Your Dog Training, or on Instagram @trustyourdogtraining, thank you. Liana: Awesome. So, guys, thanks for watching. If you want to see the rest of the videos in this series, just go ahead and subscribe and follow here, and links for everything, including how to find Amy, are in the notes and stuff so you can just take a look there, and thanks for watching! .